High School Role Models

I look back-very nice-because when I became a Jesuit then I went back and taught at BC High and it was interesting to compare the experience I had as teacher and as I had as student. But I had scholastics who you had great admiration for and who were inspirational to you. Joe Quinn in particular I remember was my sophomore year teacher and Tommy Dorsey in first year. Both of them were memorable teachers and, more important, wonderful models.

Vocation

And it was at that hospital on one Sunday morning. I was reading a newspaper, in the rotogravure section, as we used to call it. It had an article about the Trappists and the new monastery they were opening down in Georgia. It was eleven o'clock as I was reading it-I looked at the clock-and, bang. I said, "I'm not going to be a Trappist. I want to be a Jesuit." And it was instant.

Important Watermark

I think it's important to mention that a watermark in our lives was the publication of that article by Monsignor Tracy Ellis, "The Lack of Intellectual Life in American Catholicism." That really was a powerful stimulus and a confirmation of what all of us suspected, but had never articulated. That changed just so much in our collective intellectual life. So I then went down to Fordham. And I knew pretty much what I was going to do: I wanted to do a doctorate in Lonergan Studies. I got Norrie Clark as my mentor. And I wrote a doctoral thesis on Lonergan and was assigned to study here at BC.

Revising the Core Curriculum

Probably the most important thing that I did here at BC was to look at the philosophy curriculum, and say, "We had this wonderful integrated philosophy curriculum, which had been in existence for four hundred years, but it had decayed and deteriorated. And so, is it possible to put together a new integrated curriculum?" And I've spent the last forty years of my life trying to put together this new integrated curriculum, and it is the Perspectives Program. We've done a pretty good job; we haven't' quite finished it, but we're within a year, I think, of maybe completing what I hope will be a new integrated curriculum.

God's Enduring Providence

I go back to the two moments in my life that I always go back to. And those are the long retreat, that realization of the giftedness just of existence. And, of course, the vocation that I received was such an extraordinary event in my life. We're in difficult times. But at the same time we know God, the silent vector of God's presence, is right here and it's not going to leave.